Forum Moderators: open
/product_category/blue_widgets_DE100/
with 'blue_widgets_DE100/' being the actual page.
now, with a little change to the rewrite rule I could have:
/product_category/blue_widgets_DE100.html
Which would you think Google prefers in terms of helping page rank?
The W3C recommends NOT to indicate the technology used for a resource, as that may change. It recommends to establish permanent, non.chanign URIs. Therefore, I would HIGHLY recommend you do not include a file extension in your URIs. It's a legacy item from back in the old days when web-serving was done on the cheap and simple, and the local file system was abused to organise a site. URIs should be independent of the servers file system structure, and more importantly independent of ANY aspect that is NOT unique to teh document in question (such as technology used to produce said page).
SN
URLs have zero, zilch, nada influence on PageRank
Exactly.
I think what you may mean is what is the best format for your site architecture to maximise any benefit of exact match search terms.
i.e. widget.com/blue/blue-widget.htm
IMHO, don't create architecture solely for this purpose - you'll end up with a whole load of odd folders if you are handling hundreds of pages.
Having said that - I believe that there is some additional Google brownie points for a page name of the exact search string - so why not make the page name that term in the layout: blue-widgets.htm or blue_widgets.htm
I still don’t know the best way to present this in terms of increasing the search term match - directory named with keyword or page name with keyword.
Looking around google results don’t indicate to me much difference in one having higher relevance than the other.
That's because the benefits are so minor, that they are trumped by virtually every other ranking factor. Read into that 'take your pick' - at least for simple ranking purposes.
"so why not make the page name that term in the layout: blue-widgets.htm or blue_widgets.htm"
Stick with the hyphen, not the underline. There are loads of threads on Webmasterworld explaining why hyphens are preferable.
"The W3C recommends NOT to indicate the technology used for a resource"
This is perhaps taking things a little too literally. Having a .html extension isn't a bad thing. Having .php, .asp etc. extensions that reflect the technology used could be considered a bad thing. I'd tend to enable server parsing of the .html extension instead.
However, I'm not suggesting that Killroy's suggested layout isn't a good one. If anything, there are some real ease of use benefits. Also, the biggest benefit you'll get from having keywords in URLs is if someone chooses to use the URL as anchor text when linking to your site. Common sense would suggest that the more prominence your keywords have in this link text, the better, so dispensing with a file extension would seem to make sense in this scenario too.
